The Sobey Art Award longlist was announced in early May, revealing this year’s much anticipated nominees for the preeminent contemporary art award in Canada. Carrie Allison, Rémi Belliveau, Séamus Gallagher, Mathieu Léger, and Lucas Morneau were the five artists selected to represent Atlantic Canada.

The diversity among the Atlantic artists is a harbinger of hope in these bleak times, as far right sentiments continue to swell and the planet burns. Indigenous, Queer and Acadian spirits of resilience define this year’s long-listed artists and their work, offering a glimpse into the soul of the Atlantic region through their artwork.

Based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, Carrie Allison (she/her), who is Nêhiýaw (Cree), Métis and of European descent, uses the ceremonial act of beading as a decolonial methodology and a wayfinder to her ancestors, her community, and her culture. Themes of memory, the body and the land are integral to her work.

Recent works tackle concepts of settler colonial space-taking and land theft through studies of non-native plant species, like turf grass, oat and barley. Her research manifests through different forms of beaded artworks, such as individual plant portraits, GIFs and square plots of three-dimensional turf grass. The latter, titled they built fields of grass on sawdust: poplar (2023), considers the ubiquity and underlying puritanical white imperialist concept of the lawn. 

Now omnipresent across the Global North, this grass is not a native plant species to Turtle Island. Through in-depth research Allison learned about the complex settler colonial roots attached to non-native turf grass and the commonplace manicured lawn, which now threaten native plant species and our planet on a grander scale. Allison’s three-inch-tall square sods recall a perfect green summer lawn; the individual beaded strands glistening and glittering as if dew covered.

The plinth for this artwork is made of poplar, which in Nêhýaw culture holds deep significance; considered, as the artist mentions, “our first tree.” Across so-called Alberta, Allison’s home territory, Poplar and Willow trees are being decimated due to the high level of damming. 

Time and labour, land theft and violent settler colonization are key concerns Allison wants to address. In a recent conversation with the artist, turf grass and lawn care figured prominently—particularly the subversive history behind the perfect square of lawn, as the antithesis of decolonization, Indigenous land stewardship and knowledge. Aesthetically beautiful, yet critical to depths unforeseen, Allison’s work possesses a kind of divine gentleness mixed with an anarchical spirit.

Originally from Memramcook, New Brunswick, Rémi Belliveau (they/them) centres experiences of Queerness and Acadianness in their work. Across the artist’s multidisciplinary practice, they explore and destabilize stereotypes, canonized narratives, and the particular geopolitics of Acadia and Acadian history. 

Through expansive installations, film, artefacts and ephemera, Belliveau’s work blends real and imagined journeys and creates characters who underscore the ambiguous and in-between feeling of being both Acadian and Queer. Their work is largely research-based, drawn from archives and situated on the land from which their ancestors were expelled. Using the historical information gathered, Belliveau endeavours to create new hybrid-narratives, sharing stories pertaining to Acadia that, until now, were largely untold.

Belliveau’s most recent projects centre two fictional personas, embodied by the artist, in order to fill a gap in New Brunswick’s rock music history, subverting it with queerness. Their 2020 project, Hier semble si loin (1967), features the fictitious story of failed musician Jean Dularge, who is both conceptualized and played by Belliveau. 

In Belliveau’s 2023 project, L’Empremier live at Beaubasin (1970), which follows Hier semble si loin (1967) in time and sequence like chapters in a book, the artist becomes Joan Dularge, the trans feminine lead singer of the band L’Empremier. The character of Joan is a thoughtful realization of a femme trans identity for Jean Dularge and, by extension, the artist themself. Filmed largely on location at Fort Beauséjour, in New Brunswick, it presents a live concert by the fictitious L’Empremier, with altered renditions of famous Acadian songs, and interviews with each member of the band.  

The interrelated levels of complexity present in L’Empremier live at Beaubasin become especially evident as, with each round of interviews, Belliveau’s characters peel away another layer from the misunderstood story of the Acadians. The band members discuss different obstacles related to miscommunication and experiences of loss of translation that occur during the recording of the concert, which include themes of history, land and language.

The film opens with Ballade de Beaubassin part I, based on the Acadian song Ballade de Jackie Vautour (1978) by Zachary Richard. The artist’s version of the song opens with lines citing the force of Mother Nature and closes raucously, with pride, as a small rainbow peaks out over the monument to the Acadian past. Through their storytelling, the artist destroys binary distinctions, establishing a fluid, Queer approach to history and identity within the Acadian context. 

Newfoundland-born Queer artist Lucas Morneau (they/them) has made a name for themself crocheting, knitting, and rug hooking toxic hegemony out of heteronormative practices, celebrations, and rituals. Morneau uses artforms that have long been associated with handicraft, folk art, and women’s work, combined with significant cultural conventions from Newfoundland and beyond; namely, mummering, hockey and wrestling. 

Morneau’s first series of work The Ballade of the Queer Mummer uses the art of drag to underscore intersections between Queerness and the Newfoundland folk tradition of mummering, which involves disguise, in the form of handmade costumes, and performance. Picking apart the motivations behind mummering, Morneau foregrounds the essential dragness of the annual celebration. Their reframing of the tradition also creates space for Queer joy in public, an act of rebellion and reclamation for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. 

¹ Jackie Vautour (1928-2021) was well-known for his fight against the expropriation of 250 Acadian families from their familial lands in the early 1970’s to create what is now known as Kouchibouguac National Park. Zachary Richard is an American singer, songwriter and poet.

Morneau has since begun two series set on challenging and destabilizing expected gender norms and toxic masculinity in sports. The QUEER NEWFOUNDLAND HOCKEY LEAGUE (QNHL) is a fictional hockey league of 14 teams from across Newfoundland and Labrador. Team names are borrowed from cities, towns and villages across the province, combined with reclaimed pejoratives that have historically been used as slurs and hate speech against 2SLGBTQIA+ folx. Each jersey is crocheted featuring a rug-hooked team logo reflecting iconography or narrative histories somehow related to each location. 

The series also includes a set of collector cards, featuring a player from each team and their stats, in the fashion of those circulated and sold by hockey leagues. Resisting the trope of hockey being a hyper-masculine sport, the QNHL players (modeled by the artist and their assistant Libby Farrell) are goth, fashionista, goofy and oh-so-wonderfully Queer. Through their transdisciplinary practice, using drag, textiles, photography, video and performance, Morneau creates a provocative space within our strident heteropatriarchal world for subversive Queerness to emerge sparkling.   

Walking into an exhibition by New Brunswick-born Queer artist Séamus Gallagher (they/them) resembles a trip, like a dive into a multi-coloured video game. Working between different digital and lens-based media (such as 3D printing, Virtual Reality, photogrammetry, chroma-keying, green screen performances, video and photography) the artist creates dynamic fantasy-driven scenes exploring gender identity and geopolitics at home and internationally.

In artworks such as the series A Slippery Place the artist combines high-tech computer-based imaging and programming with camp lo-fi aesthetics and drag. Creating an ideal space for critique, Gallagher uses humour to discuss serious issues, such as gender-biases, trans and homophobia and the climate catastrophe. 

I’m reminded of Gallagher’s artwork Feel the Heat with Somebody (2020), a VR video, made during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, also featuring a drag persona embodied by the artist. Appearing in a fractured digital landscape of glacial mountains, the character’s wig and dress match the icy scene. At once beautiful, alluring, kitschy, sassy, and effortlessly glamorous in her Queerness, she swishes and sashays to a soundtrack of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” her dress and wig changing colour as heatwave maps roll across her body. Through the initial joy of the music, a deep concern for our planet weighs heavy.

Combining camp and drag, the fantasy make-believe lands of video games with the haunting reality of the crises humanity is currently facing communicates thoughtful criticism with grace and humour, without losing sight of the collective grief accumulating beneath the surface.

Mathieu Léger’s (he/him) practice refuses categorization. His highly conceptual yet playful and poetic actions focus on the potential his experimental processes and ideas could offer. The resulting physical works are often abstract, ghostly traces left on paper, remnant marks made using methods that form a finished object. Even in his durational performances, the process, whether witnessed or not, rests at the heart of Léger’s career. 

A self-described serial artist-in-residence, Léger has spent the last 10 years between Moncton, New Brunswick, and various other places around the globe. This continuous movement impacts the artist’s understanding of time, which is articulated through his non-linear thinking, research and work.

Sometimes Léger’s work manifests as experiments in decoding lost information or finding the potential for discovery within a recreation. One such example is Performing the Act That Makes the Mark, Which Makes the Sound (2020-present), a performance with a series of resulting works on paper. The artist traced his lineage back nine generations to the first Léger settler. Jacques Léger (dit La Rosette), it turns out, was un soldat de tambour or snare drummer for the military in present-day Fredericton, NB. 

Already a novice drummer, the artist undertook rigorous training in the rudiments of drumming, which resulted in studies of time, movement and energy. Drawings, intaglio relief prints, and sound act as, both, evidence and the final artworks of Performing the Act. Every iteration is equally fascinating in its conceptual, layered, and distilled state. The delicate intaglio prints are circular in shape, the indentations left on the copper plate by the drum beats mimic tiny lunar craters, while the surrounding area is indicative of the absence of texture, but bright as the full moon on a cloudless night. Each rendition is an attempt by Léger to translate the experience. His work sparks a curiosity that had been buried and brings me back to the infinite feeling of being small and present, in the moment.

The Sobey Award long-listed artists of the Atlantic plot an interconnected map or the region.

Their examinations of place, time and identity, from varied perspectives, challenge established ideas and structures. Moreover, the artists embody space-taking and reclaiming as acts of solidarity and resistance that, when viewed as intertwined, form webs of collective power. 

The shortlist for the 2024 Sobey was released in June announcing the five finalists, one artist representing each of Canada’s regions. In Atlantic Canada, New Brunswick born Mathieu Léger has been selected as the region’s shortlisted artist. He is accompanied by Taqralik Partridge (Circumpolar), Judy Chartrand (Pacific), Rhayne Vermette (Prairies), June Clark (Ontario) and Nico Williams (Québec). The winner will be announced later this fall, on Nov 9, 2024.